Technology, Population, and the Impact of Ancient Humans on the Environ

Technology, Population, and the Impact of Ancient Humans on the surround In recent years, mercifuls own become increasingly concerned with their effect on the planet and its ecosystems. In the prevalent view, these problems are in the raw and unprecedented in human history. While it is probably true that our advert on the milieu on a global scale has never been as great, the difference is simply the scale on which our actions are world taken. Situations that previously were local or regional in scope have now become global, owing to the increasingly sophisticated technologies that we have true and our ever-increasing population. As an examination of the impact of past humans on the environment illustrates, however, the current impact fits into the general pattern that the degree to which humans specify their environment is determined by their concentration and the sophistication of their technology. Contrary to the popular view which sees ancient humans as either benignly funding with their environments (see Note 1 below) or as leading miserable bypass lives during which they were at the mercy of those environments, archeology tells us that humans have been interacting with and affecting their environments since the beginning. As Neil Roberts comments, humans impact on landscapes began even beforelandscapes had become recognizably modern. (Note 2).My purpose in this paper is to illustrate some of the ways ancient humans, using a variety of technologies, altered the environments they lived in. Before I begin, however, I would like to emphasize that discussing human impact on the environment implies human action was detrimental to the environment. In this paper, I shall define impact as any change in the lands... ...ng paragraphs come from the authors lecture notes as describe in note 7 above, as well as Ellen, R. Modes of subsistence hunt club and gathering to agriculture and pastoralism, in The Companion Encyclopedia to Anthropology, ed T. Ingol d, fresh York Routledge, 1994. and Price, T.D. and J.A. Brown. Aspects of Hunter-Gatherer Complexity, in Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers, T. Price and J. Brown, eds. San Diego Academic Press, 1985.9. Other populations such as mammoth hunters of the Central European Plain dealt with these pressures by shifting to narrow economies based on the extensive use of a few species.10. The diametral is k-selected species such as mammoth, who produce fewer proceeds, but give these upshot more care in order to give each offspring a higher chance of survival. Earlier subsistence patterns had tended to focus on k-selected species.